Backup Job Name

Backup Repository

Immutable Backups (Only for Object Storage)

Repository Name

Job Description

1. Converting  VM to template (Creating a VM and converting to Template)
   
2. Clone to Template (Preserve the original VM and copy the VM data to a Template)
   

Note: A VM Template will not be listed for backup when trying to configure it from the ESXi host.

Note:

If the entire ESXi host is selected for backup, the new VM/s added to that host will be automatically backed up in the next schedule. Each backup job can have multiple VMs in it. During the backup schedule, VM data will be processed based on the configuration you set on the Backups > Configure Backup Settings > Concurrent Backups.

1. The option to backup your VM Template is supported from BDRSuite v5.5.
   
2. The snapshot process(Incremental backups) and app-aware process is not supported for the VM Template backup as the VM Template cannot be modified and will remain in the off state.
   
3. The existing VM Template which is backed up using BDRSuite Backup Server, if converted to a virtual machine then incremental backups will run for the converted VM as per the next schedule.
   
4. If an existing virtual machine which is backed up using BDRSuite Backup Server, if converted to a VM Template then the incremental backups will keep continuing as per the schedule and timestamps will be as usual listed at the time of restores.
   
5. Apart from App-aware processing and VMware Quiescing all the other configurations like the scheduling, additional full backup synthetic full backup, retention, file exclusion, will have the same behavior for the VM Template as it is for VM/s.
   
6. Data Integrity check will also work for the VM Template as it does for the VM/s.
   

Step 3: Specify VM/Disk Exclusion

VM Exclusion

1. If one or more ESXi hosts or vCenter Server is selected for the backup, then you can see the selected hosts are being displayed under the VM Exclusion page.
   
2. Click on the list icon corresponding to the ESXi host and select the VMs you want to exclude from the backup.
   
3. Excluding VMs is applicable only if the entire Hosts are selected for backup. It is not applicable if only VMs under Hosts are selected for backup
   

Disk Exclusion

1. You can exclude a particular disk type being backed up either at the host level or VM level using the Disk Exclusion. Under the Disk Exclusion tab, you can find all the hosts & VMs selected for the backup.
   
2. You can configure the global exclusion rules for the entire host or selected VMs by clicking on the edit icon. If you are configuring the disk exclusion for the entire ESXi, it will be applicable to all the VMs running inside that particular host.
   
3. You can also specify the disk exclusion setting for the individual VMs in the host by clicking on the list icon and selecting the VMs to which you want to apply the disk exclusion setting individually and click on Add VMs for Disk Exclusion.
   
4. Clicking on the edit icon corresponding to the Host or VM will display the following options.
   

Note: A VM Template can also be excluded and the VM/Disk Exclusion feature will work for the VM Template as it does for a normal virtual machine backup.

Steps to Identify the Disk type in VMware vCenter/ESXi host

1. Login Into Vcenter/ Esxi Host
   
2. Select the Virtual Machine whose hard disks information you want to view.
   
3. Then Select “Edit Settings” under “Actions” option.
   
4. You can see each Hard Disk with serial number under the “Virtual Hardware” tab.
   
5. Expand Hard Disk. You can see disk controller type (Like IDE, SCSI, SATA or NVMe) and its controller number with disk enumeration order (0:0) in “Virtual Device Node” option.
   

Step 4: Setup Guest VM Processing

1. On selecting Require successful application processing (recommended), the backup will continue only if all the application writers are stable and the application-aware processing is successful.
   
2. On selecting Ignore application processing failures, the backup will proceed regardless of whether application-aware is successful or not. This is not recommended, as your backup may not be transaction-consistent.
   
3. On selecting Disable application-aware processing, the backup will proceed without ensuring the transaction consistency for the applications inside the VMs.
   

1. On selecting Truncate the transaction logs, the transaction logs of Microsoft Exchange Server & Microsoft SQL Server will be truncated after the successful backups.
   
2. On selecting Do not truncate logs, the transaction logs of Microsoft Exchange Server & Microsoft SQL Server will not be truncated.
   

Oracle

1. On selecting Do not delete archive logs, the archive logs of the oracle database will not be processed or deleted during the backup process.
   
2. On selecting Delete archive logs older than, you have to specify the time period in hours. The logs older than the specified time will be automatically truncated.
   
3. On selecting Delete logs over, you have to specify the size of the logs in GB. The logs larger than the specified size will be automatically truncated
   

1. If you are selecting the entire ESXi host or vCenter server for a backup, and if you want to customize the guest processing setting for the individual guest VMs, Click on the List icon in the action column corresponding to the ESXi host or vCenter server and select the VM & click Add VMs for Guest Processing button.
   
2. Selected VMs will be listed on the Guest Processing settings page, from where you can customize the guest processing setting for the individual guest VMs.
   

Note: Guest Processing Settings is an optional step, you can also continue without setting up the guest processing. If the guest OS processing is not enabled, the snapshot is taken irrespective of whether the VSS Writers are stable or not. There is a higher chance of data corruption in this case which can lead to corrupted data restoration during disaster recovery.

1. To customize the guest processing settings of the VMs or the Host, you have to select the checkbox corresponding to the Host/VM Name and click the Edit Guest Processing Settings button on the right side of your screen.
   

1. Application-Aware Processing is set to Require successful application processing (recommended).
   
2. Log Truncation is set to Truncate the transaction logs.
   
3. Archived logs processing is set to Delete archive logs older than 1 hour.
   
4. File exclusion is set to Exclude system files like pagefile. sys and hiberfil.sys from backup.
   

Guest Credentials

1. To apply the credentials, select the VMs or Host from the list and click the Apply Credential button on the right side of your screen.
   
2. Select the credentials from the list or you can add the new credentials by clicking the Add Credentials button. The selected credentials are applied to the selected VMs. BDRSuite will try to log in to the VMs using the selected credential and perform guest processing.
   
3. If you are selecting the entire ESXi host or vCenter server for a backup, and if the login credential of the guest OS differs, then you can click on the List icon in the action column corresponding to the ESXi host or vCenter server and select the VM & click Add VMs for Guest Processing button.
   
4. Once the selected VMs are listed on the Guest Credentials page, you can customize the login credentials.
   

Note: Make sure the VMware tools are installed on the guest VMs selected for guest OS processing.

VMware Quiescing

Quiesces the VMs before taking the snapshot for application-consistent backup. VMware Quiescing should be enabled if you require application consistency for your backups. If you disable VMware quiescing for any of the VMs, then successful application processing cannot be guaranteed.

1. In the VMware Quiescing page, Toggle the slider to the right to enable the VMware Quiescing for all the VMs selected for the backup.
   
2. If you don’t want to Quiesce the one or more VMs during the backup, you can disable the Quiescing for the individual VMs.
   

Step 5: Backup Job Scheduling

1. Manually: The incremental backup will not run automatically, you have to go to Backup > List Backup Jobs page and run the incremental backups manually.
   
2. One Time: The backup will run only once at the selected time. No incremental backups will be processed after that.
   
3. Every Few Hours/Min: You can specify a frequency and days to run the incremental backups. The minimum frequency to run the incremental backups in the Every Few Hours/Min option is 15 minutes. By default, all the days of the week are selected. If you don’t want to run your backup on all days, select only the days in which you want to run the incremental backup.
   
4. Daily: In the daily option, you can specify the days and number of times the incremental backups should run on a particular day. You can run the incremental backups to run up to 5 times a day and you have to specify the time timing for every incremental backup.
   
5. Weekly: In the weekly option, you have to specify the day, and when you want to run the incremental backups on the specified day. In the weekly incremental schedule, you can run only one incremental backup per day.
   
6. Monthly: In the monthly option, you have to specify the months, and a day in the month, and a time in the selected day to run the incremental backup.
   
7. After Backup: You have to specify the name of the already created backup job. So the backup job will run immediately after the selected backup job schedule is completed successfully.
   

Synthetic Full Backup

1. If you have scheduled the incremental backups to run Every Few Hours/Min or Daily or After Backup, then you can set the synthetic merge frequency as weekly or monthly.
   
2. If you have scheduled the incremental backups to run Weekly or Monthly, then you can set the synthetic merge frequency to happen only on a monthly basis.
   
3. Synthetic merge is disabled Manually & One Time backup schedules.
   

1. If you have scheduled the incremental backups to run Every Few Hours/Min or Daily or After Backup, then you can set the additional full backups frequency as Daily or Weekly or Monthly.
   
2. If you have scheduled the incremental backups to run Weekly or Monthly, then you can set the additional full backups to run on a Weekly or Monthly basis.
   
3. An additional full backup is disabled Manually & One Time backup schedules
   

1. In case, if you are selecting the ‘Use Global Settings’, but if global backup window settings are disabled for your backup server, then the job will run as per its schedule
   
2. If you are modifying the Global Backup Windows settings later, it will affect all the backup jobs that are selected with ‘Use Global Settings’
   

Note: A VM Template if chosen for backup will also allow you to configure scheduling and the process will work as it works for VM.

Retention for Incremental Backup

Basic Retention

With basic retention, you have the flexibility to determine whether to retain a specific number of incremental versions or to specify the number of days to preserve an incremental recovery point with the following version based and day based retention

Version Based Retention

If you are selecting the version-based retention for the incremental backups, then you have to specify the number of versions to be retained. You can select from 1 to 999 versions.

Note: For example, if you configure hourly incremental backups and select ‘10 versions’ to retain, BDRSuite Backup Server will retain only the last 10 hours of recovery points of the backed-up machine.

Day Based Retention

The “day-based retention” feature in BDRSuite allows users to specify the number of days that incremental recovery points should be retained. This means that users can select a specific number of days, such as 14, to retain 2 weeks of recovery points. Additionally, the “Minimum version(s)” option can be selected to avoid losing recovery points due to backup failures.

Note: If you need to enable GFS retention, it is necessary to choose either one of the options in basic retention, as GFS retention works in combination with basic retention.

 GFS with Full Backups

1. The GFS restore points are created using additional full or synthetic full backups.
   
2. The additional full backup or synthetic full backups are marked as weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly GFS recovery points.
   
3. So, you should have already configured either the synthetic or additional full backup for the backup job.
   
4. You can either choose weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly or any combination of GFS recovery points.
   

1. Backup job configured for the entire host and a few VMs are deleted or moved from the host.
   
2. Backup job configured for specific VMs and those are deleted or moved from the host.
   
3. Backup job configured for entire host/specific VMs and then edited to exclude one or many VMs using the VM/Disk Exclusion option.
   

Note: This feature removes the deleted or removed VM’s data from the backup repository permanently based on the settings. So, once the retention time has reached, it removes the data from the storage targets. It cannot be undone.

Note:

In a scenario if the same deleted (or) removed VMs is added to the host again, as per the next schedule of the configured backup job, a full backup will be performed rather than an incremental backup. The same data will be replicated to the Backup Copy Job’s or the Offsite DR’s repository (If any configured).

Encryption

You can encrypt all the backup data for added protection. When encryption is enabled all the backup data blocks are encrypted using the AES-256 bit encryption algorithm both during the transfer and at the storage. For encrypting the backup data, you can use the system-generated encryption key or use a custom encryption key.

1. By default, encryption is disabled for all the backup jobs, you can slide the toggle to the right to enable encryption for your backup data.
   
2. Select ‘Use System Generated Encryption Key’ if you want to encrypt all your backup data using BDRSuite’s automatic System Generated Encryption Key. You do not need to specify any during the recovery or edit the backup job later.
   
3. Select ‘ Use a Custom Encryption Key’ if you want to encrypt all your backup data using your own Encryption Key. You can select the already created encryption keys that are created for other backup jobs from the drop-down list or you can
   
4. Add a new encryption key by providing the encryption password, encryption key hint.
   
5. After providing the password and hint for the encryption key, click on the Save button.

Note:

Even if the encryption is disabled, BDRSuite uses the system-generated password to encrypt backup data on storage. If you provide a custom password for encryption, data integrity checks will not be performed. It is recommended to perform Instant Boot VM periodically to ensure data integrity

Password and its hint should not be the same to avoid security issues. The Password should contain at least a character, a number, and a special character [! @ # $ % ^ & *] .Encryption hint should be at least 6 characters and not more than 25 characters. Encryption hints are unique and no two passwords can have the same encryption hint

Advanced Settings

In the advanced settings, you have to choose a backup proxy server to distribute the load of the backup server which is optional. A backup proxy acts as an intermediary component between the backup server and the source ESXi/ vCenter in managing the jobs. A backup proxy processes the data from the source and delivers it to the backup server, while the backup server administers the data from the proxy servers and writes the data to the backup repository.

1. The ESXi hosts on which the VMs are running are added as data sources to the BDRSuite Backup Server.
   
2. The VMware Backup proxy and backup repository are configured properly.
   
3. The backup repository has enough free space to store the backup data.
   
4. You have configured the email notification to receive alerts on the backup on the job such as successful, missed, or failed backups.
   
5. To back up Microsoft SQL transaction logs, the recovery model must be set to Full or Bulk-logged recovery for required databases on Microsoft SQL Server VMs. If the recovery model is set to Simple, the transaction logs on Microsoft SQL Server VMs will not be detected and processed.
   
6. To back up Oracle transaction logs, the ARCHIVELOG must be turned on for required databases on Oracle VMs. If the ARCHIVELOG is turned off, the transaction logs on Oracle VMs will not be detected and processed.